Philosophers have long struggled to reconcile Martin Heidegger's involvement in Nazism with his status as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. The recent publication of his Black Notebooks has reignited fierce debate on the subject. These thousand-odd pages of jotted observations profoundly challenge our image of the quiet philosopher's exile in the Black Forest, revealing the shocking extent of his anti-Semitism for the first time. For much of the philosophical community, the Black Notebooks have been either used (...) to discredit Heidegger or seen as a bibliographical detail irrelevant to his thought. Yet, in this new book, renowned philosopher Donatella Di Cesare argues that Heidegger's "metaphysical anti-Semitism" was a central part of his philosophical project. Within the context of the Nuremberg race laws, Heidegger felt compelled to define Jewishness and its relationship to his concept of Being. Di Cesare shows that Heidegger saw the Jews as the agents of a modernity that had disfigured the spirit of the West. In a deeply disturbing extrapolation, he presented the Holocaust as both a means for the purification of Being and the Jews' own "self-destruction": a process of death on an industrialized scale that was the logical conclusion of the acceleration in technology they themselves had brought about. Situating Heidegger's anti-Semitism firmly within the context of his thought, this groundbreaking work will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and history as well as the many readers interested in Heidegger's life, work, and legacy. (shrink)

This book seeks to redefine the purpose of philosophy for our times. Faced with the saturated immanence of the world, philosophy is summoned to return to its original vocation and, after a long absence in which it lost its voice, it is called on to reawaken the community and protect the life we share in common.

Highlights the central place of Greek philosophy, particularly Plato, in "Truth and Method" philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer's work, brings out differences between his thought and that of Heidegger and connects him with discussions and ...

The concept of understanding appears initially at the point of intersection between the philological, hermeneutical and the theological‐philosophical traditions. The concept of understanding already appears as a philosophical term in the language of the mystics, starting from Augustine, for whom it had a broader significance than merely seeing. The Kantian concept of understanding is subsequently re‐appropriated quite originally by Hamann who, by stressing the limits of the human understanding of the book of nature, develops the idea of historical understanding, grasped (...) as a situating oneself in the past that presupposes an understanding of the present and a foreseeing of the future. One of the most relevant philosophical problems that remains after Wittgenstein and Gadamer is that of the relation between understanding and interpretation. Not all understanding is interpreting, and where there is understanding, there is not interpreting and translating, but simply “speech”. (shrink)

What is the difference between hermeneutics and deconstruction? This essay provides an answer by following the guiding thread of understanding that was already brought to the fore in Paris during the "improbable debate" between Gadamer and Derrida. Maybe there was and still is a "dialogue" between the two most important currents of continental philosophy, as Derrida suggests in his talk commemorating Gadamer at Heidelberg in 2002. It is a dialogue that passes through poetry, and above all the poems of Celan. (...) In this way, the distance or the proximity between hermeneutics and deconstruction rests in the meaning of understanding: the one beginning from the uninterrupted dialogue, the other from the difference of interruption. Through a phenomenology of saying and of understanding, this essay asks at the same time how the differences of deconstruction are the stars necessary for the constellation of hermeneutics, and how the constellation is nevertheless necessary for every new star. It is perhaps the Schibboleth of Celan that indicates the point of orientation. (shrink)

In questo saggio viene esaminato il pensiero politico di Humboldt, di solito preso erroneamente per un liberalismo. Il suo congedo dallo Stato segna una riflessione critica che si interroga non sull'origine, bensě sul fine dello Stato, e ha una dimensione manifestamente an-archica. Privo di fondamento, lo Stato č solo un male temporaneo che puň essere tollerato se si costruisce la «comunitÀ» che Humboldt delinea sul modello della lingua. Perché č nella reciprocitÀ dei parlanti, delineata soprattutto nello studio Sul duale, che (...) si puň trovare una via d'uscita alla opposizione tra universale e individuale. Mentre dischiude lo spazio del dialogo, la lingua indica una comunitÀ che č non meccanica, bensě organica. (shrink)

The question concerning the difference between Gadamer's hermeneutics and Derrida's deconstruction, is a legitimate question since they are philosophies that have grown from common soil. Both philosophers, albeit via different paths, go back to Greek philosophy and continually compare themselves with it. Philosophical hermeneutics has often been misunderstood in its attempt to raise the question of understanding within philosophy. According to hermeneutics, understanding would be an appropriation of the other. Animated by a “fury of understanding”, hermeneutics seems to claim that (...) it could and should understand all in a complete and perfect way. The distance between hermeneutics and deconstruction does not lie in the goodwill to understand, but in understanding itself, in the way in which understanding follows from either the unity of the uninterrupted dialogue or from the difference of the interruption. Unity and difference, difference and unity, reassert the secret of their bond, of their elusive cross‐reference. (shrink)

Dans les pages des Cahiers noirs, qui vont de 1942 à 1945 Heidegger vient à parler des Juifs dans trois passages contigus à sa réflexion sur la technique. Le second passage, central, contient l'interprétation onto-historique que Heidegger donne de la Shoah. Dans ce passage, le grand topos de la philosophie du XXe siècle, le silence de Heidegger sur Auschwitz, disparaît. Le nom de l'extermination est pour Heidegger Selbstvernichtung. Si la « question juive » est une question métaphysique, la résolution sera (...) elle aussi métaphysique. La Endlösung, la « solution finale », dès lors qu'elle est interprétée dans le cadre de l'histoire de l’être, se révèle comme « auto-anéantissement ». Heidegger interprète l'extermination comme un « auto-anéantissement », conformément à son antisémitisme métaphysique : ce sont les Juifs qui se sont auto-anéantis. Agents de la modernité, complices de la métaphysique, les Juifs suivent le destin de la technique, que résume le mot Verzehr : les usuriers sont soumis à l’usure, les consommateurs se consument, les destructeurs finissent par se détruire eux-mêmes. (shrink)

The appearance in English of Donatella Ester Di Cesare's Utopia of Understanding: Between Babel and Auschwitz brings a distinctive development within the philosophical study of hermeneutics to an Anglophone readership.

Marranos. El otro del otro es el cuarto libro de la filósofa italiana Donatella Di Cesare, Catedrática de la Sapienza-Università di Roma, publicado en la colección «Clásicos del mañana» de la Editorial Gedisa, después de la aparición de Heidegger y los judíos. Los Cuadernos negros (2017), Terrorismo (2017) y Tortura (2018) de la misma autora. Este texto de Di Cesare es una exploración inquieta e inquietante. Su indagación no promete al lector dar, al final del recorrido, con (...) una terra incognita que se revelará reconfortantemente segura o con un tesoro hundido en las profundidades abisales del pasado, sino que se mueve en prodigiosos meandros que aguardan aun, en cada una de sus discontinuidades, una chispa de redención metafísico-política. (shrink)

Exploring and understanding how medieval Christians perceived and constructed the figure of the Prophet Muhammad is of capital relevance in the complex history of Christian-Muslim relations. Medieval authors writing in Latin from the 8th to the 14th centuries elaborated three main images of the Prophet: the pseudo-historical, the legendary, and the eschatological one. This volume focuses on the first image and consists of texts that aim to reveal the truth about Islam. They have been taken from critical editions, where available, (...) otherwise they have been critically transcribed from manuscripts and early printed books. They are organized chronologically in 55 entries: each of them provides information on the author and the work, date and place of composition, an introduction to the passage reported, and an updated bibliography listing editions, translations and studies. The volume is also supplied with an introductory essay and an index of notable terms. (shrink)

The form of an action has a strong influence on the interaction between humans. According to their mood, people may perform the same gesture in different ways, such as gently or rudely. These aspects of social communication are named vitality forms by Daniel Stern, represent a mean to establish a direct and immediate connection with others. Indeed, the expression of different vitality forms enables us to communicate our affective states and at the same time the perception of these vitality forms (...) enables people around us to understand how we feel in that moment. In the last years of research, different fMRI studies have been carried out to investigate the neural correlates of vitality forms recognition and execution. Moreover, recent psychophysics studies conducted from our research group have demonstrated the presence of an affective contagion effect, during which vitality forms expressed by an agent affect the action perception and the motor response of the receiver. This means that vitality forms expressed by others can influence our mood positively or negatively, modulating as consequence our behavior. Note that vitality forms pervade our lives in a continuous manner and thus they are not expressed and perceived only during social interactions. For example, when we observe an artistic representation at the theatre, the dynamic postures of dancers, together with an alternation of acceleration and deceleration in their movements, communicate to us different affective states. Also when we are in a museum in front of a painting, lines, colors and shapes used by the artist can elicit in us different sensations and modify our attitude. In this view, with the aim to extend the concept of vitality forms from neuroscience and psychology to other disciplines of study, we dedicate part of this review to discuss how art, in all its forms, can be considered a pure expression of vitality forms. (shrink)